Scores of kids killed at home, out of national spotlight

Dec. 17, 2012
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Patrick Hand, center, joins a march to the National Rifle Association headquarters on Capitol Hill in Washington on Monday. Statistics indicate 180 children were killed by firearms in 2010, most shot at home. / Manuel Balce Ceneta, AP

by Cathy Lynn Grossman, USA TODAY

by Cathy Lynn Grossman, USA TODAY

President Obama, from his first remarks Friday to his Sunday evening address in Newtown, Conn., has put the slaughter at Sandy Hook Elementary in a framework of the violent toll on children and youth around the country.

How many children and youth would that be?

Picture a death toll of elementary-school-age children, and younger, that is six times the 20 first-graders killed Friday at Sandy Hook.

That would be 180 children, 11 years of age or younger, who were killed by a firearm in 2010, according to the most recent report on violent deaths from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says Jonathan Lowy, director of the Legal Action Project for the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

The CDC breakdown: 41 deaths were classified as unintentional, 127 as homicide, four as suicide, and eight from an undetermined intent.

And overwhelmingly, they died one by one at home.

"In 2009, among 16 participating states in the National Violent Death Reporting System, over 86% of all firearm deaths of children 11 or younger took place in or around a home," Lowy says in an e-mail to USA TODAY.

Lowy noted Monday that it took the cumulative effect of all the gun violence during Obama's term for the president to make a strong commitment to "change."(Obama, even in Newtown, did not mention changing gun laws specifically.)

Lowy said, "The American people have to lead. The politicians will follow."

Already, the White House has been bombarded with a record of more than 150,000 signatures on a petition that calls for a change in gun laws.

Step up the age group to teens and the numbers climb. David Hemenway, a Harvard professor of health policy and director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, told The New York Times, "Children ages 5 to 14 in the United States are 13 times as likely to be killed with guns as children in other industrialized countries "

After the shootings in Aurora, Colo., this spring, Hemenway, author of a 2006 book, Private Guns, Public Health, told Times columnist Nicholas Kristof there is more social and legal pressure to require people to pick up their dog's poop than to lock up their guns.

Religious leaders are also stepping up efforts to change gun laws.

Faiths United to Prevent Gun Violence national coordinator Vincent DeMarco told Religion News Service that "the possibilities are much better" to try again to renew a Clinton administration ban on assault weapons that expired in 2004.

A coalition, which is affiliated with the Brady Campaign, includes 39 Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Sikh organizations. It formed after 2011 after the shooting in Tucson that killed six including a 9-year-old girl, and wounded then-congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.

Religion News Service noted calls for an assault-weapons ban and an overhaul of other gun laws from the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the PICO National Network, a coalition of faith-based social justice groups, and Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde of Washington and the Very Rev. Gary Hall, dean of Washington National Cathedral.

However, not every religious voice is in accord. Joseph Mattera, presiding bishop of the New York-based evangelical group Christ Covenant Coalition, wrote in Charisma News on Saturday that gun control is not the issue endangering society.

"Blaming guns for this and other tragedies like Columbine and Virginia Tech massacres would be like blaming automobiles for the thousands of deaths that occur every year due to accidents on highways and streets."